Disclaimer: I own nothing you recognise; if you're on this site, you know the drill. Also, thanks are owed to athingofvikings, who gave me a much-appreciated sounding-board for a few aspects of my planned world-building for this particular crossover; hope you like it.

Feedback: Appreciated as always.

The Dragon of Wanheda

Even after the challenge was over, a part of Clarke wasn't sure if she should be comfortable with just how easy it had been to deal with the potential threat of the Ice Queen after everything she'd heard about the older woman. She wasn't complaining about the fact that such a disturbing woman could no longer be a threat, and she had faith that Lexa could smooth over the transition of power in the Ice Nation, but considering how so many times it seemed like they solved one problem on the ground just to end up facing another…

She didn't want to think of herself as 'paranoid', but after the relative routine of life on the Ark, it seemed as though she'd rarely had a quiet day between the dropship landing and her departure from Camp Jaha. Even when she'd been able to relax while staying at the Edge, she'd only been able to let herself stop worrying because she knew that the other Riders were there to help out if anything happened. The idea of their problems with the Coalition being over after the Ice Queen's death was nice, but Clarke knew that stopping one side from causing trouble didn't mean that the other side would give it up that easily.

Still, now that she had seen that the Commander had things under control with the other twelve clans, she had decided it would be best if she checked up on how things were unfolding with her own people. As much as she wanted to have faith in her own people, after all their past mistakes she recognised that she had to focus on making sure everything was in order back at Camp Jaha. She wanted to convince herself that Charles Pike couldn't do much when he was still new to the camp, but there was always the risk of people being tempted to take what would seem to be the easy option.

Right now, she had to just have faith in Lexa to handle things at her end and make sure her people didn't do anything they shouldn't do, which meant that she had to make sure her own people didn't try something stupid. Hiccup and the other Riders had a good balance with the natural world back on the Edge, and the Coalition had spent the last few decades working the land to find a comfortable balance. Lexa had even tentatively agreed to Hiccup's suggestion that the Coalition and Berk could basically be allies rather than Berk becoming a new clan, considering the distance between TonDC and the island making regular communication difficult and the culture gap, but Clarke was aware that her people needed something firmer given how things had been so far. She just had to hope that the rest of her original group of allies had been able to keep things under control while she was away, particularly when it came to Charles Pike's own issues in dealing with the Grounders.

Still, for the next hour or so, during the trip from TonDC back to the Ark's current camp, Clarke could just enjoy flying with her dragons and her new friends. She might have to be a leader to her people, but the most Hiccup and Astrid expected from her was to be a healer who offered ideas, and Griffin and Charlotte seemed happy so long as she paid attention to them, all of which Clarke was more than happy to do.

She had a feeling that she would always have a sense of quiet dread when she saw the camp until she actually had a clear treaty drawn up between the Ark survivors and the Coalition, but that was basically a problem for the future. Right now, as she flew on her dragon alongside the friends who didn't seem to depend on her for everything, she could enjoy the moment now and worry about everything else later…

The more time Bellamy spent listening to Charles Pike's speeches, the more he wished that the Ark survivors had someone like him in a position of power from the beginning. Working with the grounders had seemed like a good idea at the time, but ever since the Mountain Men had been defeated and Clarke left, they'd just been forced further and further back into the camp, given basically no chance to actually establish any kind of presence here on Earth. Like Pike had pointed out, right now they had the advantage of surprise because the Grounders didn't know exactly what they might be capable of with their weapons, and that was before he started thinking about Clarke's new allies.

Dragons…

A part of Bellamy couldn't believe that Clarke had kept that particular story secret, but he supposed he could understand not wanting to share something that had apparently just been for her and her father. After so long with Octavia as a 'secret' between him and his mother, he could understand the idea of wanting to keep a secret between parent and child, particularly after everything that had happened between Clarke and her mother. Even if the dragons they'd seen so far were the only dragons from this 'Dragon Sanctuary', Bellamy could understand why someone might find them so fascinating, and that was before he started thinking about some of the other things dragons could do in those myths he'd read in the past.

The thing he had more trouble understanding was why these new allies of Clarke's were so reluctant to get involved in events on the ground. After everything that had happened before Mount Weather abducted most of the original group, Bellamy wasn't sure if he'd ever be ready to fully trust the Grounders not to turn on them the moment someone from the Ark broke some law or custom without even realising it would be offensive to them. If these people were reasonable enough to let Clarke have a dragon of her own, they were obviously less paranoid about strangers, and if they lived far enough away they probably hadn't been affected by anything that the Ark had done since landing…

"Rough day?"

Bellamy could only nod as Pike sat down opposite him, a grim expression on the former teacher's face as he placed his own tray opposite Bellamy's. The food was basic, but Bellamy had to hope that someone had some ideas for how they could properly cultivate crops for the future. They were getting by on the Ark's old hydroponics bay, and some of the newer arrivals were willing to learn how to hunt, but that would only get them so far for so long…

"The thing people forget," Pike observed after he and Bellamy had spent a few moments eating in silence, "is that we've basically just traded one set of problems for another."

"We have?" Bellamy looked back at Pike, curious to hear where he was going with this.

"Do you seriously think we can trust the Grounders in the long term?" Pike observed. "From what I've heard, you only made it work because you had a common foe; take that away, and these people are just going to want to get rid of the intruders in their territory."

Bellamy had to admit that was a thought he'd been considering more than once since the deaths of the Mountain Men. Lincoln was only staying with them because Octavia insisted on giving him somewhere to stay after everything he'd done for them, and his people still officially refused to take him back. Did that really suggest that the Grounders would be that tolerant towards a whole bunch of outsiders who'd screwed up their existing situation so badly just by showing up?

But on the other hand…

"It's… been tense, but it's not going badly so far…" he said tentatively.

"Only because we've stuck to their rules while your group are focusing on building up your territory here," Pike said, "Meanwhile I lost people just for landing in the wrong place when we didn't know that might be a problem; should we really be condemned because we made a mistake?"

"We… could apologise…"

"That's never going to be enough for them," Pike said, his tone cool but firm. "Kane and the others are good people, but they can't accept that we're fighting a war to earn our very rights to exist down here. We can't just sit around and wait for them to hit us; we've got the advantage of weapons and numbers for the moment, but if they decide to bring it all together we're in trouble. What if these people decide they've got the right to police us? What if they send in more of their own people to keep us trapped in this camp 'for our own good'? We have to get out there and take action before we get so locked down that we don't have any kind of freedom."

"And… how do we do that?" Bellamy said tentatively. "We can't just… the guns will help, but that just gets us the first win…"

"Not if we can get the dragons on-side."

"The dragons?" Bellamy suddenly felt more uncomfortable at this particular turn in the conversation. "Clarke said they weren't going to get involved in any of this…"

"And that's nice if they're not going to help the other Grounders, but we need a guarantee," Pike said. "They're going to have to pick a side like everyone else now that they're getting involved, and that means they're going to need to make it clear to everyone else where they stand-"

"Because we have to be on your side or we're your enemies?"

Looking back on that moment later, Bellamy would refuse to admit that he'd actually jumped from shock when he heard that unfamiliar voice speak up from behind him. He tried to control his initial response so that he just tensed up from the surprise, but he was fairly sure that he and Pike were both shocked by the speaker and just both came to an unspoken agreement that they wouldn't reveal how shocked they were at the time. Turning around, Bellamy saw the young blonde woman who had arrived at the camp riding a blue dragon alongside Clarke; he was fairly sure she'd been introduced as 'Astrid', but he wouldn't like to swear to it as he'd been more focused on Clarke at the time.

"It's not like- I'm not saying-" Pike began, clearly thrown at the unexpected arrival.

"That kind of thinking isn't going to get you anywhere," the girl said (Bellamy would think of her as Astrid until he knew otherwise), sitting down opposite him and Pike. "I admit that I'm a warrior myself, but I've been through a lot back home, and if there's one thing I learned from all that, it's that getting stuck in that kind of mental rut doesn't get anything done."

"Mental rut?" Pike looked indignantly at the young blonde. "I'm trying to protect my people-!"

"From a fight that you're so sure has to happen you might end up provoking it; have you ever thought of that?" Astrid countered, a glare on her face that put Bellamy in mind of Clarke at her most stubborn. "From everything Clarke told us, your first conflicts with the Commander's people were basically all provoked by misunderstandings because you didn't know they were here and they weren't expecting anyone to come here in the first place. Isn't it better to find another way out of this that doesn't involve killing people?"

"I'm just taking precautions to protect us from their next offensive," Pike retorted. "Either they finish us or we finish them; it's the only way to be safe-!"

"And now I'm definitely having a sense that I heard this kind of speech before."

"…What do you mean?" Bellamy asked.

"Our people had a long-standing enemy too," Astrid said, hostility replaced by a reflective tone as she looked between them. "For so many years, we fought in the belief that it had to be kill or be killed, either we finished them or they would finish us… until Hiccup reached out and chose not to kill when he had every reason to believe a captured enemy would kill him, and opened the door to a new way of life beyond anything we could have imagined."

"The dragons?" Pike looked sceptically at her. "You're comparing this to-"

"Weren't you the one who said that the Commander's people were 'animals'?" Astrid said with a pointed smile at Pike's discomfort.

"I just meant that-"

"Either they're animals you think you have to kill or be killed, or they're people that you can reason with and you're just choosing to kill them because it's easier."

Bellamy didn't know how this woman managed to convey so much disgust in that word, but he suddenly felt a sense of shame at the idea that he'd ever been thinking of going along with Pike's suggestion. He didn't know if he was a good person after everything he'd done to protect Octavia and get away from the Ark before he appreciated the scope of their challenges on the ground, but hearing the contempt in another person's voice at that idea, he suddenly knew that he didn't want to be the kind of man who could do this kind of thing.

"…I can't do this."

"What?" Pike looked at him.

"Astrid's right," Bellamy looked back at him, growing more certain of his decision with every word he spoke. "If we do this… even if you're right about us defending ourselves, we're basically just proving ourselves the monsters. We already had to destroy Mount Weather to save ourselves; we shouldn't have to define ourselves by how many people we have to kill to keep ourselves safe."

"Take a cue from my people," Astrid put in, her smile suddenly warmer as she looked at him in an approving manner. "Sometimes in any war, the best way to end it is to not fight."

"But… if we don't establish ourselves properly…" Pike began, even as his expression showed that he wasn't as confident in his decision as he had been.

"If the only way you can make an impression is to kill people, you need to ask yourself if that's the kind of impression you want to make," Astrid said. "I've faced a few moments where I had to decide between what I wanted to achieve and how I wanted people to see me afterwards… and every time I realised that I didn't want to be the kind of person who'd take the more brutal option. Sometimes the bravest thing any warrior can do is try for peace in the hope that tomorrow can be better than today, but if you only give people a reason to kill that's all you'll get."

"So… we're not just backing off and giving up, right?" Bellamy looked cautiously at her.

"Hey, if you have to defend yourselves, we'll be there," Astrid said with a shrug. "We're just not going to provoke a fight, and we'll do everything we can to make sure that you both find a chance at peace before anything else."

Pike frowned at that statement, but there was a grim resignation in his manner that left Bellamy fairly confident he wasn't going to do anything on his own. Bellamy knew that the older man was completely over his issues with the grounders yet, but if Pike was willing to do something other than look for another opportunity to attack the grounders, Bellamy would take what he could get.

As Astrid got up and walked away, Bellamy allowed himself a wistful smile as he watched her leave, only to scold himself when he remembered the way she'd been so close to that 'Hiccup' guy basically every moment they weren't sitting on their dragons. He wasn't sure if there was anything there or if he was overthinking things, but until he knew for a fact if Astrid was single he wasn't going to do anything more than appreciate her insight.

He might be concerned about what the grounders could do, but Astrid was right; if they wanted to live in peace on the ground, they had to be prepared to work for peace, rather than prepare for wars that they might just end up provoking.

Clarke wasn't sure how she should feel about being back with the rest of the Ark. She already knew that she wasn't going to stay here full-time when the dragons still needed to be protected from the hunters back on the Edge, even as she appreciated how her new friends were so willing to help her deal with something that would never have affected them if she hadn't brought it into their lives. She appreciated how her mother and Raven had accepted her return, and even Monty and Octavia seemed willing to give her a chance, but she knew that she couldn't just go back to who she had been before she found Griffin.

Sitting on the edge of the camp, watching her old friends going about their new duties while her new friends mingled, Clarke wondered at how much had changed beyond just having her own dragon since she had left the other Ark residents. She felt no urgent need to re-establish herself with her old group even if she'd welcome any of them who wanted to talk to her in turn, and there was something nice about seeing Hiccup examine some salvaged tech to try and figure out how it worked (she'd introduce him to Raven once she was sure her friend wanted to talk). Astrid had gone off to see some of the warriors out of what she described as 'professional curiosity', which left Clarke free to check up on how Ruffnut and Tuffnut had interacted with the camp while she and the others were away. From how the twins had described it, Clarke got the sense that nobody here had been sure how to talk to them without her as a kind of 'buffer', which just made Clarke even more unsure about her place here now.

She still felt a responsibility to help the former Ark residents survive on the ground, but she didn't feel the same… need to be in control, was the best way she could think of it. Maybe working with Hiccup had given her a better sense that other people could be trusted to make decisions, but she at least wanted to believe that her people could cope without her. Pike was a problem, and she wasn't comfortable with some of the things she was hearing about Jaha's current beliefs, but she didn't want to live in a society where people couldn't speak up…

"You really think you deserve to be back here?"

"Jasper?" Clarke couldn't stop her shock as she looked up at her friend. She would have expected the bitter tone in her old acquaintance's voice- she couldn't entirely call him a friend as she didn't feel that she was that close to him on his own- but seeing Jasper stagger around as he walked towards her, a scraggy beard on his face, and she was left with some serious concerns about his mental state. "What are-?"

"You… you think you can just come here… on top of that big lizard… and act like it's nothing?" Jasper said, waving a hand at Griffin. The dragon lowered his head and growled at Jasper, clearly concerned by the threatening tone even if Clarke still wasn't sure if dragons could understand the words.

"I don't expect anyone to just 'forgive' me-" Clarke began as she placed a hand on Griffin's head, only to jump back as Jasper tried to hit her with a flailing punch. "Hey!"

"You should be dead!" Jasper yelled, trying and failing to deliver another punch as Clarke stepped back and away from Griffin, not wanting her dragon to get hit and lose his temper. "This is all your-!"

"Hey!" another voice called out, Clarke looking up to see Ruffnut approaching her and Jasper with a surprised expression. "What's all this?"

"This bitch is- she killed my- they're all dead-!" Jasper ranted, his arms waving as though he wasn't sure if he wanted to hit Clarke or just point at her to emphasise his point.

"Jasper," Clarke said, having moved far enough away from Griffin and Jasper that she was sure neither of them would get hurt, "if you think I don't regret what happened to Maya and the other innocent people in Mount Weather, you're wrong."

"And I'm supposed to believe that?" Jasper countered, angry tears gleaming in his eyes as he looked at her. "You just get to go out there and find all these new things-!"

"I had no choice; there wasn't another way-!"

"Oh, so now you get to say you're innocent-!"

"I never said that!" Clarke cut Jasper off, regret replaced by indignation. "Just because I didn't apparently spend the last few months sitting around feeling sorry for myself doesn't mean I don't regret what happened!"

"Says the girl who went off and got a cool new pet with her new friends-!"

"You know, kid," Ruffnut stepped forward to grab Jasper's shirt and haul him towards her, "speaking as one of those 'new friends', let me ask you this; you're so keen to criticise Clarke and the way she did things, what would you have done differently?"

"…Huh?" the former Ark resident looked at the female twin, his anger displaced by confusion at this shift in conversation.

"I mean, my brother and I talk about how Hiccup's way of doing things is boring when he's coming up with the plans, but once it's over we go with it because his plans always work," Ruffnut elaborated. "If you're going to keep hating Clarke for how she apparently screwed up, does that mean you have an idea of what she could have done differently, or are you just being annoying?"

"Annoying?" Jasper reached up to force Ruffnut's arms away as he glared at her. "Do you even get what she did?"

"I get that if Clarke did something so terrible you're still angry about it, she's probably regretting it more than you seem to realise," Ruffnut said, returning Jasper's glare with one of her own. "What she did basically doesn't matter right now; I'm asking if you can actually think of what she could have done instead."

"She could have not killed people-!"

"And how could I do that?" Clarke cut Jasper off, walking over to stand beside Ruffnut and join her new friend in staring down her old one. "They were about to start cutting my mom up for her bone marrow, Jasper; I had minutes at most to come up with something new that didn't involve opening the vents! If I'd done nothing she would have just been the first of us to die, and Mount Weather would have kept on killing people until they had enough bone marrow to let all of them get out of the mountain, and what would they have done then? I get that Maya wasn't the only good person in the mountain, but you and I both know there were enough bad people in it that we wouldn't have had a chance if they could get out in large numbers!"

"That…" Jasper said, glaring indignantly at her even as he waved his hands in exasperation. "There was… we could have done something else…"

"If you ever think of what else we could have done, you can blame me as much as you want," Clarke said, stepping forward to stand directly in front of Jasper, hoping her former companion in survival could see her grief even if she refused to make it too obvious. "But right now, don't you ever think that I didn't try everything I could think of to avoid being forced to make that kind of decision before I did it. Nobody wanted it to get that far, and we're always going to regret what happened, but sometimes all we can do is learn from what happened and hope that we'll never have to be in that kind of situation again."

"…What if I can't?" Jasper asked, sounding far more withdrawn than his earlier hatred.

"Give it time," Ruffnut said with a grim shrug. "We've all had to do rough stuff while trying to protect people. Sometimes we screw up, sometimes people get killed, sometimes all we can do is keep everything together even if we didn't stop the other guy for good…"

"The point," Clarke said as she looked at Jasper with a sad smile, "is that we all have to face our pain in our own way, but blaming other people for what happened… we can take responsibility for what we did, but obsessing over it doesn't change what happened. You can mourn what happened to Maya, but if you obsess over what happened… look, would Maya want you to just obsess over her death or try to remember what she was like before all this happened?"

The pained expression on Jasper's face made Clarke feel briefly ashamed that she'd forced him to think about Maya all over again, but the fact that he didn't lash out at her again gave her some hope that he had taken on what she had to say.

"I…" he said, looking between them both for a moment before he let out a final sigh and waved a hand off to the side. "I'm… gonna go over there…"

As she watched Jasper walk off, Clarke could only hope that her words had made some kind of long-term impression on him. She wasn't going to kid herself that he was just going to get over what seemed like months of grief and pain over the fall of Mount Weather because of one lecture from her and Ruffnut, but hopefully their words had made enough of an impression that he'd at least start thinking about what he wanted to do with his life apart from grieve.

"…Thanks," she looked over at Ruffnut with a smile. "That was…"

"Eh, what can I say?" Ruffnut grinned back at Clarke. "Blowing stuff up's the simple kind of fun, but Hiccup encourages you to think about everything when you've got the time."

"Yeah, he's good at getting you to think," Clarke nodded at the female twin. "By the way, where's your brother?"

"Taking in everything around," Ruffnut smiled. "He got a bit curious about that guy who used to be your chief; says it's surprising how someone can sound so mad without looking the part…"